The country’s largest carmaker, which gets over 20% of total sales from diesel cars, earlier announced plans to phase out diesel cars after BS-VI implementation in April 2020 due to cost implementation.

Maruti Suzuki will be giving five year extended warranty on small diesel cars to bring confidence in the market. The company has also announced that Brezza and S-Cross will have a BS-VI petrol vehicle very shortly, by the end of this year.

“What we had announced was that for smaller diesels, we will move out of the same. Because to convert a BS-IV vehicle to BS-VI vehicle in diesel is expensive. So already the difference between a diesel car and petrol car about a lakh and ten or twenty thousand and you add another big cost to it then the gap becomes so large that the consumer in smaller car at least which is more price sensitive, they’ll probably reject it,” said Shashank Srivastava, executive director, Maruti Suzuki India. However, in the larger diesels, the company still have options open.

“We are going to study the reaction of consumer because those vehicles will also come at a higher cost. So we have to study the consumer reaction and then we will decide what is to be done regarding BS-VI for larger diesels,” he said.

“We have done about 30% of that work (completing transition), which constitutes 50% of the volume. So now we will start the balance work in the next couple of months, you will see in the next three months all the other vehicles also become BS-VI,” Raman said.

“Typically our understanding is that for BS-IV petrol to diesel, price point difference is Rs 1 lakh. It may go up in a small car to Rs 1.75 lakh or Rs 2 lakh in case of BS-VI,” he said.

Changing market dynamicsThe carmaker sees a major change in the market dynamics with BS-VI implementation as it will tilt more towards bigger cars and small cars may see a decline. “In the market, there is going to be definitely a shift. Today you see petrol to diesel, the price difference is maybe Rs 8-Rs 9 in the market. Even though the fuel efficiency is higher in a diesel engine by about 20-25%. The acquisition cost being higher, so small car segment will see a decline in the diesel,” said Raman.

“We feel all small cars should be converted to CNG going forward.” Diesel penetration among passenger vehicles is likely to come down to 15-20% after BS-VI implementation.